ROI – SEO provides trackable and quantifiable results, regardless of whether you are an e-commerce or non-e-commerce site so there are no qualms when it comes to ROI. SEO agencies are able to track nearly every aspect of their strategy, like increases in rankings, traffic, and conversions. Comprehensive analytics also provide the ability to drill down at a granular level and see demographic information and other engagement metrics for individuals who have interacted with your website. E-commerce sites, SEO agencies can see which paths users take in order to complete a sale, all the way down to which keyword they used to search for you prior to purchasing. For non-E-commerce sites, you can attribute values to your lead conversions, like a ‘contact us’ form fill-out, and calculate the value of your SEO strategy that way.

A key benefit of using online channels for marketing a business or product is the ability to measure the impact of any given channel, as well as how visitors acquired through different channels interact with a website or landing page experience. Of the visitors that convert into paying customers, further analysis can be done to determine which channels are most effective at acquiring valuable customers.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site's user experience and performance in organic search results. You're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they're essential ingredients for any web page, but you may not be making the most out of them.

On-page SEO is the work you do on your own website to get a high rank in search engines. Your goal is obviously that your website will show on the first page and perhaps even among the first three search results. On-page SEO does not carry as much weight as off-page SEO in the rankings, but if you don’t get the basics right… it’s unlikely that your off-page SEO will deliver results, either.
SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engine companies recommend as part of good design ("white hat"), and those techniques of which search engines do not approve ("black hat"). The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.[49] White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.[50]
Search results are presented in an ordered list, and the higher up on that list a site can get, the more traffic the site will tend to receive. For example, for a typical search query, the number one result will receive 40-60% of the total traffic for that query, with the number two and three results receiving significantly less traffic. Only 2-3% of users click beyond the first page of search results. Your first opportunity to delight comes directly after the purchase. Consider sending a thank you video to welcome them into the community or an onboarding video to get them rolling with their new purchase. Then, build out a library of educational courses or product training videos to cater to consumers who prefer self-service or simply want to expand their expertise.
Within your channel itself, you can also organize videos into playlists, making it easy for your audience to search within your content. As a social platform, viewers can engage with your videos by liking and commenting on them, providing you another chance to interact with your audience. YouTube also offers a variety of advertising options for more sophisticated targeting.

Brand Awareness – Since top position rankings result in significant impressions, having your website in these top positions on the result pages translates to more exposure for your website. Plus, being on the first page for your targeted keywords not only helps users to associate your brand with those keywords, but it instills trust since companies on the first page are generally perceived to be more trustworthy. The more your pages and content rank in high positions in the search engines, the more chances you have for users to see your content and associate with your brand.

Our team is made up of industry-recognized thought leaders, social media masters, corporate communications experts, vertical marketing specialists, and internet marketing strategists. Members of the TheeTeam host SEO MeetUp groups and actively participate in Triangle area marketing organizations. TheeDigital is an active sponsor of the AMA Triangle Chapter.

All of these questions can help determine what type of video you should make and where you should post it. For example, if your target audience is not familiar with your company, you probably want to make a video that focuses on brand awareness before producing an in-depth, product video. You’ll also want to host your video on a site that already has a large reach, like YouTube.

Search engines use complex mathematical algorithms to guess which websites a user seeks. In this diagram, if each bubble represents a website, programs sometimes called spiders examine which sites link to which other sites, with arrows representing these links. Websites getting more inbound links, or stronger links, are presumed to be more important and what the user is searching for. In this example, since website B is the recipient of numerous inbound links, it ranks more highly in a web search. And the links "carry through", such that website C, even though it only has one inbound link, has an inbound link from a highly popular site (B) while site E does not. Note: Percentages are rounded.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site's user experience and performance in organic search results. You're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they're essential ingredients for any web page, but you may not be making the most out of them.
SEO often involves the concerted effort of multiple departments within an organization, including the design, marketing, and content production teams. While some SEO work entails business analysis (e.g., comparing one’s content with competitors’), a sizeable part depends on the ranking algorithms of various search engines, which may change with time. Nevertheless, a rule of thumb is that websites and webpages with higher-quality content, more external referral links, and more user engagement will rank higher on an SERP.
Deliver value no matter what: Regardless of who you are and what you're trying to promote, always deliver value, first and foremost. Go out of your way to help others by carefully curating information that will assist them in their journey. The more you focus on delivering value, the quicker you'll reach that proverbial tipping point when it comes to exploding your fans or followers.
Where and When: Plan for the best time of day for lighting in each location, as well as rain dates as needed. Marketing videos are often done indoors in your own office, without a lot of frills. So lighting may not be a factor, but you may want a time of day when they’re less foot traffic and interruptions. Remember to give everyone ample time to ensure they won’t be rushed or panicking to get it right.
Your site’s URL structure can be important both from a tracking perspective (you can more easily segment data in reports using a segmented, logical URL structure), and a shareability standpoint (shorter, descriptive URLs are easier to copy and paste and tend to get mistakenly cut off less frequently). Again: don’t work to cram in as many keywords as possible; create a short, descriptive URL.
Of course, you can also include shorter content on YouTube as well, especially if your content is in YouTube’s ad format – viewers don’t have much patience to wait through ads on YouTube, and will often skip ads as soon as they are able. This is your opportunity to use the short-form content you’ve created that jumps immediately into your message and entices viewers to keep watching right from the first second.
Priit is the founder and CEO of DreamGrow Digital, an internet marketing and social media company. With his 20+ years internet marketing experience he is Helping companies to understand and use the digital marketing to reach their target audiences. He's also writing on a personal growth website Fixwillpower.com. He has spoken at hundreds of seminars and conferences on different aspects of internet marketing. Priit is also the organizer of Digital Elite Camp, a leading traffic and conversion event.

A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as the first, leftmost link and list the more specific sections out to the right. We recommend using breadcrumb structured data markup28 when showing breadcrumbs.

An entrepreneur or freelancer has two main strategies to tap into when marketing online. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which attempts to rank your website on search engines “organically”, and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which ranks your website in search results in exchange for money. Both strategies can be used to build a business succes...

Jim Boykin blows my mind every time I talk to him. I have been doing SEO for 15 years and yet I am amazed at the deep stuff Jim comes up with. Simply amazing insights and always on the cutting edge. He cuts through the BS and tells you what really works and what doesn't. After our chat, I grabbed my main SEO guy and took him to lunch and said "you have to help me process all this new info..." I was literally pacing around the room...I have so many new ideas to experiment with that I would never have stumbled onto on my own. He is the Michael Jordan or the Jerry Garcia of links...Hope to go to NY again to Jim's amazing SEO classes. Thanks Jim! Michael G.

Search engines are a great way to find business online. They offer “passive” marketing approaches for those who don’t want to get into “active marketing”. SEO can be incredibly powerful, but it’s often too slow for someone who needs clients today (rather than in six months’ time) to be a good marketing strategy when you launch your business. It’s cheap (though it’s not free – your time is worth money too), and it can be very effective in the medium to long term.

The majority of new websites created today are built upon WordPress. QuickSprout.com is built on WordPress and most of my readers have site using this popular CMS. I find most people get the basics pretty good for WordPress and SEO, but we’re going to take things a bit further in this section. You’ll find a detailed walkthrough of setting up the SEO for WordPress plugin, improving your WordPress speed and performance, creating a custom author page and more.
Google has a very large team of search quality raters that evaluate the quality of search results, that gets fed into a machine learning algorithm. Google’s search quality rater guidelines provide plenty of detail and examples of what Google class as high or low quality content and websites, and their emphasis on wanting to reward sites that clearly show their expertise, authority and trust (EAT).

Influencer marketing: Important nodes are identified within related communities, known as influencers. This is becoming an important concept in digital targeting. It is possible to reach influencers via paid advertising, such as Facebook Advertising or Google Adwords campaigns, or through sophisticated sCRM (social customer relationship management) software, such as SAP C4C, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage CRM and Salesforce CRM. Many universities now focus, at Masters level, on engagement strategies for influencers.

Unfortunately, lighting is another iPhone feature that just won’t cut it on your professional marketing videos. Use the best natural or indoor light you can to strike a balance, flatter your subjects and craft a professional look. If your lighting resources are sparse, invest in some low cost lighting or reflectors made specifically for DIY filming.
The question isn’t whether to use video in your marketing strategy, it’s how. Marketers are faced with so many distribution channels, and it seems the game is always changing. How can marketers keep up? First, YouTube surpassed the popularity of live television, and now the big, flashy report is that Facebook has 4 billion video views each day and may be stealing YouTube’s throne right out from under the video site.
While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.Brand Awareness – Since top position rankings result in significant impressions, having your website in these top positions on the result pages translates to more exposure for your website. Plus, being on the first page for your targeted keywords not only helps users to associate your brand with those keywords, but it instills trust since companies on the first page are generally perceived to be more trustworthy. The more your pages and content rank in high positions in the search engines, the more chances you have for users to see your content and associate with your brand.

3. General on-site optimization. On-site optimization is a collection of tactics, most of which are simple to implement, geared toward making your website more visible and indexable to search engines. These tactics include things like optimizing your titles and meta descriptions to include some of your target keywords, ensuring your site’s code is clean and minimal, and providing ample, relevant content on every page. I’ve got a huge list of on-site SEO tactics you can check out here.

Current search engine optimization focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page has appropriate title tags and that the content is not "thin" or low-quality. High-quality content is original, authoritative, factual, grammatically correct, and engaging to users. Poorly edited articles with spelling and grammatical errors will be demoted by search engines.

Video and mobile go hand in hand. 90% of consumers watch videos on their mobile. From Q3 of 2013, mobile video views have grown more than 233 percent. YouTube reports mobile video consumption rises 100% every year. Since people like to watch videos on the go, and the number of smartphone users is growing, your video audience keeps getting bigger and bigger.
This will give you an indication of how many times a search is performed in a month (low numbers are not very useful unless there is a very clear buying signal in the keyphrase – working hard for five hits a month is not recommended in most cases) and how much the phrase is “worth” per click to advertisers (e.g., how much someone will pay to use that keyphrase). The more it’s worth, the more likely it is that the phrase is delivering business results for someone.
In the last 10 years, the digital landscape has changed significantly. People are phasing out desktop and laptop computers to search the web and interact with content. Instead, they are picking up their mobile phones and tablets. What’s more, digital technology is cheaper today than it’s ever been before; there are virtually no boundaries on how, when and where people can interact with content.
When running PPC ads, it's important that you keep careful track of the specific ads and keywords that you're targeting. You can do this by using the Google Analytics UTM builder to create campaign URLs that you can use to track the campaign source, the medium and any keywords or terms that you might be targeting. This way, you can determine the effectiveness of any campaign that you run and figure out the precise conversion rate.

After that, you need to make a choice about how to construct an online presence that helps you achieve that goal. Maybe you need to set up an e-commerce site. If you’re interested in publishing content to drive awareness and subscribers, look into setting up a blog. A simple website or landing page with a lead capture form can help you start developing your brand and generating traffic. A basic analytics platform (like Google Analytics, which is free) can help you start to measure how you are tracking towards your initial goal.

Lastly, 2018 has brought about a penchant for the authentic and raw. According to HubSpot Research, consumers and customers actually prefer lower quality, “authentic” video over high-quality video that seems artificial and inauthentic. What does this mean for you? That video is within reach for businesses of virtually any size — team and budget, alike.
Part of what makes SEO unique, fun and challenging is that we get to be like detectives on the web. We have to be good at pulling data from different places and getting that data no matter what it takes sometimes. Some new ways have come about lately for doing so. We’re going to walk step by step through nine specific ways you can collect data more effectively.

But beyond video’s unique ability to convert like no other, the medium has become especially valuable to data-driven marketers. This is because you can track and measure audience engagement for video in a really meaningful way. You can tie your videos directly to the deals they are helping to influence and you can see which assets are actually resonating based on content engagement analytics. This is the reporting that marketing desperately needs to identify their most engaged leads faster and prove the value of game-changing initiatives.

Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.[15] Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.[16] Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.[17]
While most search engine companies try to keep their processes a secret, their criteria for high spots on SERPs isn't a complete mystery. Search engines are successful only if they provide a user links to the best Web sites related to the user's search terms. If your site is the best skydiving resource on the Web, it benefits search engines to list the site high up on their SERPs. You just have to find a way to show search engines that your site belongs at the top of the heap. That's where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in -- it's a collection of techniques a webmaster can use to improve his or her site's SERP position.

When they’re considering buying something and want to research their options, there’s a variety of methods used. Some of the top tactics are a search engine, visiting a company or product’s official website, looking at review websites, and watching videos. Video could easily be incorporated into every one of those places, giving your brand a better chance of convincing the consumer.

For content to stand out, businesses must differentiate their material from other companies, especially competitors. Some methods that have worked are innovative series that develop fictional characters or storylines centered around a specific product. Other campaigns serve essentially as commercials for a business, such as Red Bull’s campaign that features extreme sports athletes, or serve as how-to’s that establish thought leadership.
Video advertising is becoming more and more affordable and widespread. Video adoption grows partly because advances in technology but also because it’s easy to spread across the globe. Making marketing videos for your business requires creativity and knowledge of human psychology. The cocktail of these components makes it possible to create real miracles of advertising at minimal cost.
3. General on-site optimization. On-site optimization is a collection of tactics, most of which are simple to implement, geared toward making your website more visible and indexable to search engines. These tactics include things like optimizing your titles and meta descriptions to include some of your target keywords, ensuring your site’s code is clean and minimal, and providing ample, relevant content on every page. I’ve got a huge list of on-site SEO tactics you can check out here.
The course work of a marketing program will consist of real-world and hands-on components, such as case studies of both successful and failed marketing campaigns, and simulated businesses marketed by students using the concepts they have learned. This will include diving into several computer programs like Adobe InDesign and Dreamweaver, as well as both free and proprietary website analytics software.
When would this be useful? If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam. Nofollowing these user-added links ensures that you're not giving your page's hard-earned reputation to a spammy site.
Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom 404 page30 that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user's experience. Your 404 page should probably have a link back to your root page and could also provide links to popular or related content on your site. You can use Google Search Console to find the sources of URLs causing "not found" errors31.
As an internationally recognized Search Engine Marketing agency, we have the team, technology, and skills to manage large budget PPC campaigns with thousands of keywords. We have the ability to manage enterprise level accounts in multiple languages. IMI is also partner with Marin Software to provide our clients with the best possible advertising management platform, reporting dashboard, attribution modeling, and reporting.

YouTube SEO is search engine optimization to help people find your videos more easily. With millions of videos on the platform, you need to use video SEO to make your videos stand out. To optimize videos effectively, it’s important to do keyword research and to use those keywords in your video title, description, and tags. If people find and click your video, that will improve its rank. Other aspects of YouTube SEO include viewing time, comments and shares.

Thanks to its viral nature, simple accessibility and built-in value, video marketing stands out as a smart way to approach content marketing in 2017 and beyond. Video marketing is an incredible way to create content that is personal and has a real impact on your audience. It has an incomparable ability to create emotion driven sales – and sales are always personal on some level. Buyers want to feel good about their choice, and video marketing, when done correctly, is the best way to create this feeling.
Web design is a very technical field that requires high literacy in many different kinds of software, including image editing and website architecture programs. A designer should be comfortable with computer “languages” like HTML and stay up to date on new technological developments. The designer is also an artist, so he or she should also have a firm grasp on aesthetics, visual continuity, and image composition.
Around the world, 91 percent of consumers are likely to reward brands for authenticity and share the brand with friends and family, and 62 percent are likely to purchase from or show greater interest in purchasing from a brand that authentically expresses itself. Interestingly, U.S. consumers were less likely to build trust with new brands as compared to others globally, particularly the openness expressed by Asian consumers. For U.S.-based businesses marketing domestically, video content is the key to building trust.
Prioritizing clicks refers to display click ads, although advantageous by being ‘simple, fast and inexpensive’ rates for display ads in 2016 is only 0.10 percent in the United States. This means one in a thousand click ads are relevant therefore having little effect. This displays that marketing companies should not just use click ads to evaluate the effectiveness of display advertisements (Whiteside, 2016).[42]
The thumbnails of your video can either inspire clicks or send potential customers on their merry way. The video thumbnail is usually a frame of the video itself. If, however, your thumbnail features a boring frame such as a blank screen or a surplus of words, consumers may assume that the video is uninteresting. Choose thumbnails with action, color, and excitement.
SEO is also about making your search engine result relevant to the user's search query so more people click the result when it is shown in search. In this process, snippets of text and meta data are optimized to ensure your snippet of information is appealing in the context of the search query to obtain a high CTR (click through rate) from search results.